Alas ! my dear friend, what a state of affairs ! <br />How unjustly we both are despoil'd of our rights ! <br />Not a pound of black flesh shall I leave to my heirs, <br />Nor must you any more work to death little whites. <br /> <br />Both forced to submit to that general controller <br />Of King, Lords, and cotton-mills Public Opinion ; <br />No more shall you beat with a big billy-roller, <br />Nor I with the cart-whip assert my dominion. <br /> <br />Whereas, were we suffered to do as we please <br />With our Blacks and our Whites, as of yore we were let, <br />We might range them alternate, like harpsichord keys, <br />And between us thump out a good piebald duet. <br /> <br />But this fun is all over; farewell to the zest <br />Which Slavery now lends to each cup we sip ; <br />Which makes still the cruellest coffee the best, <br />And that sugar the sweetest which smacks of the whip. <br /> <br />Farewell, too, the Factory's white pickaninnies, <br />Small, living machines, which, if flogg'd to their tasks, <br />Mix so well with their namesakes, the billies and jennies, <br />That which have got souls in 'em nobody asks ; <br /> <br /> <br />Little Maids of the Mill, who, themselves but ill fed, <br />Are oblig'd, 'mong their other benevolent cares, <br />To keep 'feeding the scribblers,' and better, 'tis said, <br />Than old Blackwood or Fraser have ever fed theirs. <br /> <br />All this is now o'er, and so dismal my loss is, <br />So hard 'tis to part from the smack of the thong, <br />That I mean (from pure love for the old whipping process) <br />To take to whipt syllabub all my life long.<br /><br />Thomas Moore<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/epistle-of-condolence-from-a-slave-lord-to-a-cotton-lord/
